“The Raven” holds an archetypal Gothic mood over the reader. It is set up from the famous opening lines of the poem:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.
Several separate moments establish this mood. In the first two lines, Poe introduces the narrator as “weak and weary,” staying up late one “dreary” night while studying some ancient text. The temporal setting, the narrator’s exhaustion and mental fatigue, and the reference to old literature all fit with the Gothic tendency to find disadvantaged characters in dark, unsettling spaces amidst an overarching preoccupation with the arcane. Poe sustains, and indeed enhances, this mood throughout the poem by introducing the Raven as an unsettling new character:
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore--
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."
The Raven is a classically Gothic source of supernatural unease: a black bird with some mysterious intelligence—and the ability to talk, albeit sparingly—that sits "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt" upon the bust of Pallas. Its presence reinforces the Gothic mood of the story, and enables the narrator's dialogue that conveys his grief and anguish at the loss of Lenore—another major contributing factor to the dark and dreary mood of "The Raven."
